Goodbye civilization?

Mendocino Coast/Photo by MJ Anderson GarciaFor the past thirty-some odd years, I have been a city-dweller.  I’ve lived in a lot of different places, but they’ve all had a certain population density (over a million at least in the metro area) and a certain “urban” character. It hasn’t always been fabulous—pollution, Chicago blizzards, city crime, Chicago heat waves, traffic, Chicago spring ice storms and mud, political corruption, tornado watches (Chicago, of course—do you see a theme here?)—but I’ve always felt that the cultural rewards (theater, film, museums, shopping, diversity, etc. ) made it all worth it. At least, that is how I felt until my husband got laid off this winter.  All of a sudden, like so many Americans, we found ourselves Without A Plan.  We wanted to start our own business (my husband is a master artisan baker), but we didn’t have the capital necessary. My husband was way overqualified for all the jobs in the SF bay area, and jobs in my field (education, research, and writing) were extremely scarce.  We sent out resumes, did tons of internet research, and started considering jobs in L.A., Seattle, and even Chicago (I was suffering from a condition called Weather Amnesia, apparently).  There were a few jobs out there, but none were right for us.

 Then, out of the blue, my husband heard about a job in Mendocino county. I had of course heard of Mendocino (what born and bred Northern Californian hasn’t?), but I had never been there.  I told my husband that I had heard that it was very artsy, and that it was on the coast, and we got excited—maybe this was the opportunity we had been waiting for! Then I began to do some research.  As it turns out, despite my extremely excessive over-education and pride in knowledge of global geography, I was rather ignorant about an area in my own backyard.  I thought Mendocino was on the small side, and yes, it is, but MUCH smaller than I had imagined:  822 people. Fort Bragg, next door, is the big city:  6, 623 people. Willits, the “large” town on Highway 101 an hour east of Fort Bragg? 4,933 people.  I started panicking. I scanned the map up and down the coast and started googling like mad. I discovered that on the Northern California coast, the three “cities” that stand out as large population centers are San Francisco, Eureka, and Fort Bragg. Eureka has 25, 396 people.  San Francisco would be about 4 hours south of where we’d be living, the thriving metropolis of Eureka about 3 hours north.  Could we really do this?

 To make a long story short, we will see if we can really do this. The job offer was by far the best my husband got, and it turns out that I can probably get a teaching job at the local community college as well. The Mendocino coast is absolutely gorgeous, and the people, though they may be rather scarce, are warm, friendly, liberal, and community-oriented.  We are moving to the Mendocino coast in about a month, and we’re excited about the opportunities there, but I have to admit that the thought of this city-dweller living in an area where the big city has less than 7,000 inhabitants is rather daunting.  And rather humorous, I hope.